Design goals

[Ursula Dreier]

Hi everyone,

from the postings I've read I got the impression that Ultra still is in
a very early design state, but you seem to be determined to create (yet
another) traditional, compiler-centric, heavy-optimized programming
language.

I'm assuming that you spend all this effort not just for fun, but want
to result to be accepted by users as well.

For this, a PE must offer something which is currently missing or not
done satisfactorily be other products. I think I have a proposal for
such a thing.

That would be a really easy-to-use, powerful integrated development
environment (IDE) that allows creating big projects with minimal hassle.

Let my try to explain what I mean:

I used to develop business database applications with a tool that had
the potential to be such a IDE if they only  would have been developed
it further in that direction, and if it had had an open enough
architecture. I'm talking of SqlWindows from Gupta. But, alas, this
isn't the case.

Now I'm developing Windows-based stuff using MSVC++6.0 and, compared to
SqlWindows, I really *hate* it. If I think back to the old days when I
used C, that actually wasn't much better (not as complicated of course,
but not really user-friendly either). But I didn't notice that, because
I didn't know anything better!

I can tell you exactly which things I feel most annoying about C++ (and
traditional languages in general), but I won't go to lengths here. But
I'm absolutely sure that it is possible to create an programming
environment in which standard programmers (I'm not speaking of little
Einstein's) don't have to spend half of their time dealing with
compiler- and language-related difficulties instead of actually
programming. It certainly *is* possible to avoid most of the common bugs
and mistakes that are a programmer's daily burden and to make it easy on
the programmer without sacrificing security.

I got *lots* of ideas how to do that.

Maybe the resulting program would be somewhat slower than what could be
produced using a language like C++, but who really cares? If it's good
enough, so be it; otherwise, there is always the possibility for
optimisations. But it would likely contain less bugs than a traditional
program while being finished in less time.

Of course, I know that there are applications where speed is crucial;
but there are already so many well-introduced languages for that
purpose.

Maybe you want to consider the idea to create such an IDE, which has the
potential to be a really novel thing, instead of a traditional computing
language.

I would be very delighted to discuss this idea further, if you like.


Hans-Dieter Dreier